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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 4951133" data-attributes="member: 54707">I enjoyed the pilot a lot for these reasons:1. It was totally different from the other, more formulaic Stargate shows. It reminded me a lot more of the mystery and darkness and frontiers nature of the movie than the shows. That was obviously intentional.2. They are cut off form support and relieve. Totally cut off even from technological resupply. Every technological advantage they have in the future will have to be scavenged or adapted from the ship they are on. This will inevitably change their relationship with technology. On all previous shows they were masters or could become masters of the technology they built, employed, adapted, or adopted as their own. Not so here. (As a matter of fact on shows like SG-1 the technology was little better than magic and metaphysics with a thin spray paint veneer of pseudo technology. Not so here I suspect, it will be a much grittier, more desperate, survival advantage relationship with technology, less much of the fantasy tech-elements.) Here they may very well find themselves not so much masters of technology, as needing to adapt themselves to the existing technology, or at least to become a sort of biological partner with it. They will also obviously have to concern themselves with basic survival conditions, water, food, shelter, even atmosphere. And eventually they will either have to gain navigational and piloting control of the vessel, or work in cooperation with it to gain supplies.3. Nobody knows what they are doing or how to go about it. A distinct advantage for this type of show.4. There is a very muddled chain of command. In all other Stargate shows there is an easy chain of command/chain of expertise narrational path to the stories. In this one one of the main conflicts will be who is in charge, what is each one trying to take charge really attempting to do, and how does each one formulate a different set of objectives as a result. Rush to me is annoying (in a way), he's also extremely interesting because of his own particular motivations. (Speaking of which he obviously has motivations beyond the current situation. He obviously hopes to either use the technology of the ancients or the fact that the ship he had hoped to reach was so far displaced in time - remember it is literally in relation to them either billions of years behind or ahead of them in time relative to their point and time of departure - to arrive at a point to correct whatever situation he desires to correct. That he considers tragic from his past. None of the shows in the past ever did a good job of addressing this spatial-temporal displacement problem in relation to ship travel versus Gate travel versus origin points versus destination points, nor did they ever do a good job of coming up with some method to compensate for what would have really happened. It was just assumed everything in background would magically match or align with all time frames rendering a zero-sum misalignment when displacing that much space. I hope this shows will take on those questions in a far more clever and actually - at least for a TV show - scientific manner.)5. You have a built in conflict of motivations - Exploration versus rescue/retrieval, personal versus group, survival versus adapted advantage, mystery of the situation and what is the mission of the ship versus what the party thinks it is really doing and what they think they need to be doing, a very confused command and objective structure (civilian leadership versus military leadership versus individual initiative versus necessary expertise accommodations - you even have the pre-structured "institutional expert versus the rebel kid/outside the system supposed genius with conflicting motives - though I'm unconvinced as yet the kid is anything more than one trick pony), mystery of the missing crew/or automatic station versus lack of real decay and seemingly constant or perpetual motion between galaxies (something no-one seems to have really commented on or thought about yet, but where is the energy for this machine to operate coming from and considering the huge distances supposedly traveled, what is the real energy source? For that matter if the ship is an automaton then why is it so large (unless it was designed specifically to move beyond normal time/spatial constraints and then be re-crewed at some future or even past time) and why does it even have a life support system? Is it artificially intelligent, has its mission been conscripted or changed over time, have aliens boarded and modified systems, has it had past or will it have future occupants, what is the destination, what are the mission objectives, why is it pursuing that flight path, what was its point of departure, has anything been recorded or logued other than the flight path, and so forth and so on? In this sense the ship itself reminds me both of the Anderson story the Boat of a Million Years, and the actual design of the Egyptian Boat of a Million Years, or Sun-Boat (the feathered rear of the ship especially - which makes me think there is something distinctly non-Ancient about the ship, or that it is a sort of group effort of parties not strictly limited to the Ancients). I've hardly enumerated all of the possibilities, just some of the more obvious ones. Personally I liked that it broke with previous Stargate formulations and that it is much darker and much more confused in intention and purpose. I'm making a near total assumption here but I'm thinking it might possibly have been designed to explore or scout places for Stargate emplacement or to reach or search out, or maybe it already has, a destination that it is not possible to reach by Stargate. I would also be very surprised if in that expanse of time that it would have not been modified by others, maybe even by now, or by design, be Artificially Intelligent it its own right.Anyway to me, I thought the pilot quite good. I'll have to see where it goes but I like the inherent potential.</blockquote>

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